"NEWT"

This little Guy with Number#3 on his shirt is headed to the baseball field next to the Community Center.

Selective Colorization.

I just found out there's a button on Capture NX2, that could recover the original color on the picture. Just 4 clicks, and I could create something like this. I have done similar effect like this before on CS5, it tooks me a lot longer just for one picture.

CHILD OF THE PLAINS

This will be my first photo in a series of what I call "Art In The Park".

"JANEY" is the name I gave to this young Lady of the Plains.

Born in 1887 this young Lass of Raven Black Hair was surveying her options and thinking towards the future. This was Statehood Day,
November 16, 1907.

Half white, half Indian, she never felt or accepted the stigma . Educated and knowing what she wanted, this statehood only gave her more boldness and a legal avenue to further her dreams. Little, or maybe she did know, how her actions would inspire a few of her heirs.

Thirteen children, two dying plus her husband a Mr. Coffee of trading post history in Oklahoma almost broke her heart, the other eleven
kids were from my Grandpa Parker, He was a Cowboy from Texas.

Prior to meeting him, Janey had already accumalated property in Wapanucka,OK., been to New Mexico and homesteaded land along with her Dad and brothers. Between Clovis and Portales they accumalated a respectable acreage. I visited the graves of my family there and the land they owned, but for the life of me I did not see what drew Janey there. But land she did leave! For whatever its worth. If you ever have a chance to travel in New Mexico between Clovis and Portales and come to a wide spot called Dora, say high to the Lanes and Parker's.

Did not mean to get so far off base but Grandma Martha Jane, "Janey", which is such an inspiration to all of us lives on. None of her grandkids ever seen her alive or heard her voice. She passed in 1933. Dad was born in 1922, will be 90 his next Birthday. My last link with her.

Never fear Janey, I will see you Memorial Day in Tuttle, Oklahoma, and will give a tip of the hat to your dreams. You are truly are The Spirit of Oklahoma!

Birds.

Blackhawk Down

Cheryl and I went for a drive on Sunday just to get away from the house and the computers for a while. We headed towards the local lake for the possibility of getting some good photos and as we were driving across the dam I spotted a dark green "thing" sitting in a small field about a mile away. If the rotors hadn't been turning I probably never would have seen it.

Naturally I was curious so I started looking for roads that would get us closer. As we came up on the field, about 300 yards from the car, we watched as the Blackhawk would lift off and hover about ten feet off the ground and then set back down again.

We watched this for about 30 minutes and I never really could figure out what they were doing. They would hover for a while and then set down, then they would hover and fly a little and then set back down in the same spot as before. I could see one of the crew members looking down at the ground as if he was watching the wheels or the wash from the rotors but I never did see anything wrong.

After about 45 minutes we saw the Blackhawk fly off to the east and disappear. It made for some interesting shots.

These were all hand held with the Sigma 150-500mm, most shot at 500mm. I did a little tweaking of the sky in Nikon's NX2 to take some of the brightness out and then framed them up in Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Antique Cars.

1961 Volkswagen.

1965 Mustang.

I went to my son Taekwondo tournament last weekend, and it just happen they have a car show there along with the body builder expo.

Checking out Oloneo

Oloneo is one of the newer pieces of software for creating "HDR" images which it does quite nicely I must admit.

What I was curious about was taking a single RAW image and getting the most "Dynamic Range" out of it with just one photograph. Oloneo does this quite nicely as you can see in the above two pictures. I set the camera to take one RAW picture and one Large/Fine JPEG image all in one shot. The top picture is the JPEG as shot and the bottom picture is the RAW picture processed with the Oloneo software. Can't see that much difference until you view the pictures larger.

The program is free to try for 30 days which I am doing now... 28 days left to go.

Ultra wide Macro lens... Hu?

Found this Bumble Bee on a Canadian Thistle plant but I had the Sigma 10-20 mounted on the camera... What the heck, I took the picture anyway, from about about 6" away which is as close as you can get with this lens and still be in focus. Post processing includes cropping, framing and resizing.

Toroweap AZ.

Before.

After.

The bottom picture, it has an orange color graduated filter applied to it. All of this are done on "color efex pro software". I thought by doing this, it could make the skies more dramatic, and the color matching the canyon. I hope you like it!

Mexican hat rock.

This is two exposures, one at before Sunrise, and one around 9:00 A.M. Then merge them together in CS5.

Antelope Canyon

These are from Nikon D3X camera with 24-70mm f/2.8, and 14-24mm.

Birds.

The weather is here, I wish you were beautiful

Ahhhhhhhhh.....

The weather finally broke. I didn't expect it to be in the middle of August but it was only 76 degrees yesterday! It's only supposed to be in the 80's for the next 5-6 days.

Now I know how Paul feels! LOL

A dogs life

Had fun with this top photo... Even though I have been keeping my camera at -0.7ev for most of my picture taking this picture was blown out, it was quite a bright day and all the detail in the Maggie's fur was lost. But with a little creativity in Photoshop CS4 I was able to get most of the detail back without giving the picture a goofy look.

Maggie, Sunny and Buster... The chase is on! Wouldn't it be nice to have this much energy? It was making me tired just watching them.

Arizona Landscape.

In Pairs!

I'm not sure I have posted these pictures or not. These are just old pictures that I found from my external hard-drive.

Quartz and???

I have no idea about rocks and minerals much but I know how to spot pretty ones... LOL

These rocks are from the same beach walk where I found the sandstone formation and took the picture of the Lighthouse.

Extreme Make-Over

A monstrosity in progress.

A new trailer park popped up overnight for all of the TV people's trailers and campers for some of the crew.

The folks from the TV show Extreme Makeover have been in our little town the last two weeks building a home for a veteran who suffered a brain injury during a road-side bombing. He has PTSD and was in therapy in California for the PTSD before all of this started. The TV show apparently took him out of his therapy so they could send him on "vacation" so the show could film the family together.

I have seen this show a couple of times and all the while thought it was a good thing and was charitable work but seeing these folks up close makes me think otherwise. A lot of folks in our little town are extremely concerned about the house they are building and the things they are doing to the family.

This family, a husband, wife and two kids were living in a 1500 square foot home and the show is building them a new home of 4700 square feet, including a swimming pool. The family was having a hard time paying their $600 a month rent and now they will be living in this monstrosity that will cost them that much just in utilities each month, not to mention the taxes and insurance costs.

The show is setting this family up for failure and it's dispicable. The veteran that has PTSD doesn't like and can't be around large open spaces or a lot of noise without it affecting him so what did they do? They built him a huge house with a "theater room".

Keep in mind the show builds these houses in just one week and they started from scratch on this one. The land was donated, they dug a hole, formed and poured the basement and started building before the concrete ever had a chance to cure. The show has been advertising for volunteers to donate the time to help in construction and some of the people who actually work in construction and did volunteer their time did not go back after a few days just because of the shoddy work that was being done.

Can you tell I'm a little upset? This is at least a $300,000 home if not $400,000 and they are trying to build it in a week for someone who the house itself will drive crazy. The show doesn't appear to have any consideration for the veteran at all.

And if that wasn't enough, our town has a little country club with a golf course and one of the Kansas Senators showed up to take a tour of the club house becuase the show was going to have a dinner this Sunday for some of the volunteers. Once they had their tour they started demanding that the owners paint the walls and get new furniture and and make several other costly changes because the senator was going to be there and it will be shown on TV. The manager of the club was shocked and didn't know what to tell them. I on the other hand, could have thought of plenty of things to tell them and most of the words could be spelled with four letters!

Pultney Point Light Station

Looking to the right from those interesting sandstone formations I posted yesterday you can see Pultney Point Light Station on Malcolm Island. Took this with the Nikon 18-135 then embellished it some in CS4.

SLOW ONE WAY

This is what the sign read as the lead rider approached the summit of Mt.Scott. After the long circular and sometimes extreme grade to reach the top slow would just come natural. These two guys were flying and not even breathing hard! Hats Off to youth and being in shape!

From the archives.

Interesting sandstone blocks

Found this patch of sandstone with this pattern of cracks in it while out hiking the other day. Perhaps it's the old road to Atlantis! LOL

On another note I finally figured out where the "Straighten Horizon" tool is on PS4...

- From the pull down menu select "Filter"

- Select "Distort"

- Select "Lens Correction"

- Now look up in the upper left of the screen, there are several icons there. One is the "Straighten Horizon" tool.

Talk about hiding the silly thing away or what!

Long Exposure!

I thought this might cool us down a little! It's 106 right now, and I just want to book a fight to Kauai for month.

Old Man's Beard

Found a rather gnarled tree growing on the edge of a beach a few miles from here. Not only was it gnarled but it was also the only tree covered with "Old Man's Beard" in the area.

Got curious so went looking on the internet. "Old Man's Beard" is a type of "Lichen" which is a complex partnership between fungi and algae. It has many traditional uses, fabric dye, tender for starting fires, food and nesting material for forest animals to mention a few. Apparently it does not hurt the tree it grows on either as it only grows on the tree and not into it. Lichen only needs moist air and sunlight to grow. And lastly lichen will not grow where the air quality is bad, like the preverbal canary in the coal mine of air quality... Interesting.

Yellowstone Lake

This picture combine with 4 frames, and stitched in CS5. Yellowstone is a big lake, so I could not get the background close to the frame. Therefore, I have to find a little cove so I can get the background clear enough. This location is somewhere North of Grand loop Rd.